On the Silver Globe actually appeared in newspapers shortly after Wells’ The First Men in the Moon, which sounds like they might be similar, but they couldn’t have been a more different read. In Wells’ book, the main character basically floats over there in a relaxing manner, and has a jolly good adventure that results in him coming back to good old Blighty with gold in hand to make his fortune. In stark contrast, Żuławski’s characters start with their leader dying in a crash and spend most of the book in a desperate race for survival, surrounded by grimness and death, with zero hope of return.
Both Żuławski and Wells combined the high-adventure romance stories of the likes of Verne with the anxiety of the beckoning age of modernism. But Jerzy’s work stood out.
What makes these books unique when compared to other novelistic experiments of the period [...] is that they interweave two antagonistic cultural modes: popular romance in its scientific and travel-adventure varieties, and modernist poetic reflection on the mythological and transcendental foundations of human history. In doing so, the trilogy seeks to reevaluate the mythical and archetypal treasury of western culture [...] but also produces a highly readable treatise on the role of individuals in society. Such a hybrid between early modernism and popular romance is unusual, because the two cultural modes emblematize opposing approaches to modernity, a catastrophic and positivist one, respectively.
Despite their adventures, his characters are trapped to repeat the past mistakes of history, politics and religion, which just wasn’t something tackled by anybody working in this sort of genre.
Stretched between melancholia after an evanescing sense of wonder and a hope for the possibility of resetting of human history without erasing cultural memory, Żuławski’s adventurers quest after the ‘grail’ of re-enchantment. Their pursuit takes them across landscapes that keep reminding them—like the spectral sphere of the Earth haunting Korecki’s expedition—that even when we manage to escape to other worlds and to the future, we will always find that our history got there before us.
History was doomed to repeat itself, as we shall continue to see later on in this article.